Do We Really Only Use 10% of Our Brain?

With the new movie Lucy coming out and revolving around the idea that a woman who could use 100% of her brain would gain godlike powers, neurologist Krish Sathian of Emory University debunks the common myth that we only use 10% of our brains:

While the movie looks like a fun fantasy, it’s amazingly absurd to imagine that we would evolve all these extraordinarily useful powers without ever actually employing them (or that we would evolve them but then for no good reason stop using them). One would probably have to be a creationist to believe that such sophisticated powers, ones far beyond any human capacity, could be implanted in the brain despite never being employed. And then you’d have to think the God that created us with these unlocked powers was giving us this enormous set of potential and not giving us access to it. Which really wouldn’t be such a brilliant design, now would it?

Dr. Daniel Fincke has his PhD in philosophy from Fordham University and spent 11 years teaching in college classrooms. He wrote his dissertation on Ethics and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. On Camels With Hammers, the careful philosophy blog he writes for a popular audience, Dan argues for atheism and develops a humanistic ethical theory he calls “Empowerment Ethics”. Dan also teaches affordable, non-matriculated, video-conferencing philosophy classes on ethics, Nietzsche, historical philosophy, and philosophy for atheists that anyone around the world can sign up for. (You can learn more about Dan’s online classes here.) Dan is an APPA (American Philosophical Practitioners Association) certified philosophical counselor who offers philosophical advice services to help people work through the philosophical aspects of their practical problems or to work out their views on philosophical issues. (You can read examples of Dan’s advice here.) Through his blogging, his online teaching, and his philosophical advice services each, Dan specializes in helping people who have recently left a religious tradition work out their constructive answers to questions of ethics, metaphysics, the meaning of life, etc. as part of their process of radical worldview change.